It'd be interesting to go back and run some of the software from the Windows 95 era (and the OS) on a higher-quality machine. I and most of my friends were using low-quality 486s and Pentium clones and it's certainly possible a lot of the problems had to do with hardware quality.
I honestly remember the later Windows 98 experience as being almost crash-free, and since the architecture was basically the same a lot of that probably has to do with higher quality hardware (and better drivers, of course). That was the golden time of the Intel 440lx and 440bx and ECC RAM support on desktop motherboards, when just about every blue screen could be attributed to those newfangled AGP graphics accelerators...
If your PC is faster than a certain speed Win95 won't boot.
This bit us at VMware, since it was common to want to run old Win95-only software in a VM on fast machines. We ended up having the VMM (Virtual Machine Monitor) patch up the bug when it did binary translation.
I honestly remember the later Windows 98 experience as being almost crash-free, and since the architecture was basically the same a lot of that probably has to do with higher quality hardware (and better drivers, of course). That was the golden time of the Intel 440lx and 440bx and ECC RAM support on desktop motherboards, when just about every blue screen could be attributed to those newfangled AGP graphics accelerators...